At the 11th hour, Liliana Gomez offered a concession.
A motion was on the table Monday night that would have immediately appointed her to the Hermiston School Board, a position she sought since she unsuccessfully ran for office in 2021. The board was at a stalemate over the appointment, the outcome of weeks of disagreement. It appeared as if there was no path forward, and that’s when Gomez unexpectedly approached the board from the audience, urging caution.
“I did not come in expecting the motion to appoint me,” she said. “I think (the) integrity of the board is very fragmented, especially to the public.”
Gomez suggested the board reopen the position. She said she would reapply and go through the appointment process again, along with anyone else who sought the seat.
But Gomez’s request went unheeded. When the board held a vote on the motion, a key vote flipped and the board appointed her with a bare 4-2 majority.
A contested vote
Monday night’s appointment came after a weeks-long conflict set in motion when board member Bryan Medelez, the board’s only Latino member in a district that’s 58% Latino, resigned in August.
By Sept. 26, when the school board interviewed the three candidates who applied for Medelez’s seat — Gomez, Teri Vander Stelt and Kristin Connell — a second seat had opened due to board Chair Josh Goller’s sudden resignation.
Following the interviews, the board quickly reached a consensus on appointing Vander Stelt to replace Medelez, according to the East Oregonian and a video recording of the meeting. Vander Stelt was immediately sworn in.
A subsequent motion to appoint Gomez to Goller’s open seat ran into more opposition. Board members Dain Gardner and Sally Hansell argued the board and public needed more time to consider the process to replace Goller since his seat only had been open for a few days.
Both Gardner and Hansell were elected in 2021, the former defeating Gomez to win his seat. The pair were joined by their new colleague Vander Stelt in voting down Gomez’s appointment.
Gardner and Hansell contradicted themselves just minutes later when they backed a motion to appoint Connell to the vacant seat. The pair were once again joined by Vander Stelt, but the rest of the board voted against it, leading to another 3-3 deadlock. The board ended the meeting before filling the seat.
Public interest was high going into Monday’s meeting. In addition to a healthy in-person audience, more than 60 people watched online at the livestream’s peak.
During the public comment section of the meeting, several attendees took issue with the board’s lack of diversity. In a district with a majority-Latino student body, the board was in danger of creating a governing body that would be 100% white.
‘Do better. Be better.’
Gomez didn’t mention her Hispanic identity during the September interviews, instead choosing to focus on her volunteer work and her role on the district’s budget committee.
But it was a point Gomez’s supporters were willing to state out loud.
Janeth Macias, a Hermiston High School graduation coach, was one of several Latino district staffers who spoke out against the board’s actions. Macias told the board that her school was working with a group to coordinate a Dia de Los Muertos event in Hermiston.
“The purpose of it is for all community members to feel welcome into our schools,” she said. “And it disheartened me to see the behavior of our board members last meeting. I didn’t come back and do all the work that we’re doing to take a huge step back. So what I say to you all is: Do better. Be better.”
Delfino Osorio Garcia, an instructional coach, remembered his fifth-grade year when his teacher wouldn’t allow him to distribute new calculators to his classmates. When another student, “someone whose parents owned the fields that my parents worked at,” made the same request, the teacher granted it.
“Now imagine running for a board position and being told no,” he said. “And then five seconds later, someone who looks completely different than you is told yes. This is our life.”
Karen Sherman, who voted to seat Gomez at the September meeting, used Osorio Garcia’s story to make her own point.
“In my opinion, that’s what we told Lili Gomez,” she said. “We told her, ‘You can come to as many board meetings as you want. You can sit on our budget committee, you can ask those hard questions. But by gosh, you are not going to sit on this board. You’re not good enough to hold a computer or a calculator.’”
The recently resigned Goller, who returned to the boardroom as a member of the public to say the board “appeared truly dysfunctional” at its last meeting, rebuked some of his former colleagues. Without naming names, he said the community was “perhaps now encouraged and emboldened to recall from office board members that continue to use their positions to grandstand rather than doing the work of promoting student achievement.”
Once the criticism finally dried up, the board members who voted against Gomez’s appointment said they held no ill will toward her. Although they returned to critiques of the appointment process, it also became clear that the conflict extended beyond filling the vacant seat.
Debate and deliberations sometimes referenced an ongoing dress code controversy at Hermiston High School or the board’s feelings about Superintendent Tricia Mooney.
“This board has had a reputation over the past as being a rubber stamp for the superintendent,” Gardner said. “That was one thing that many people came to me when I decided to run for this position. That’s a problem.”
When it came time to vote, Hansell flipped her vote to support Gomez’s appointment while Gardner and Vander Stelt voted against.
After Gomez was sworn in, she sat next to Gardner for a few minutes as the board wrapped up its business.
If Gomez hopes to hold onto the seat long-term, she’ll need to run again in May. She could not be reached for comment.